Tom Shales

NBC’s “Supersize Thursday” – on which three sitcoms each ran 40 minutes long – proved perhaps most inventive when it came to shifty product placements. There was something almost Pirandellian about the way the placements were sneaked in by loudly announcing they were there, but pretending to be kidding – got that?

In the highly improved sitcom “30 Rock,” a network exec played by Alec Baldwin tries to get Tina Fey, as the producer of a “Saturday Night Live” sort of TV show, to sneak plugs for GE products into her sketch scripts. She gets huffy and says she will “not compromise the integrity” of her precious show. Then she not-so-casually mentions to a coworker how much Diet Snapple tastes like the real thing, they exchange raves about how great Snapple is and, later, a man dressed as a Snapple bottle emerges from an elevator.

A joke? Well not exactly – because “30 Rock” did indeed include ads for Snapple somehow tied to the placement. The make-believe plugs were in fact real plugs disguised as make-believe plugs.

“30 Rock” was preceded by “The Office” during which one of the office workers chopped up greens for a salad by putting them through a paper shredder which he said was from Staples office supply. Guess what product was pitched during a nearby commercial break – the paper shredder from Staples, perchance?

We all know NBC has fallen on hard times – and on dumb ideas – but this kind of bait-and-switch ad-as-joke-as-ad seems smarmily deceptive. Better to just do the damn plugs honestly and not pretend they’re spoofs of plugs. “Hiding” them in a show by loudly announcing they’re there is a little like doing a documentary on pornography that just happens to feature generous excerpts from hard-core films. Whoring is whoring, no matter how one tries to dress it up.

To paraphrase one of Claude Rains’ famous lines from “Casablanca”: we are “shocked, shocked” to find product placements going on here – and being passed off as self-referential spoofing. There’s something about it that smacks of smirkiness – and a contempt for us poor schnooks watching innocently at home.